December 30, 2011

If I were an editorial cartoonist, I'd probably draw an end of year cartoon that had the current year being wheeled out on a gurney, with EMTs pounding on his chest and preparing the paddles, while the incoming baby new year watches him being wheeled out with a WTF look. But given that I have not a scintilla of drawing ability, you will have to make do with the word image.

And though the world really seems to be going to hell in a handbasket, that isn't to say that my year has been crappy. No major illnesses or injuries, still have a job, still have a roof over my head. I suspect that as I get older, I'm just happy to make it through another year, whereas when I was younger, I would be upset I had such a boring year. And a younger self would probably be upset with the wish that they have a safe new year. The older me alternates between thinking that's the best we get and the best that we should expect. But to all of you who've come by and said something, or just read something here, I hope you've made it through the year intact and the next year will be more of the same.

At any rate, here is a thread to tell everyone what kind of year it has been and maybe predict what kind of year it will be. Have at it.

December 29, 2011

I have a constant frustration with the legal system: that its mechanisms often cause a focus on the wrong thing. I don't mean that it focuses in areas I think are unimportant--though that happens too. I mean that even if it is looking in an important area, the structure of the legal system leads it to deal with the issue in the wrong way.

There is a certiorari petition before the Supreme Court on the question of whether or not bringing a drug sniffing dog to somone's home counts as a police search. It is a legal problem at all because using drug sniffing dogs on a person's car has been deemed "not a search" under the 4th amendment. This is a surprising result in itself, but leave that aside for the moment. So having discovered that using a drug sniffing dog around a car isn't a search, some police officer decided to use it around a house. This ends up implicating all sorts of problems, because constitutionally speaking homes are specially protected areas when it comes to police searches.

So now various high courts have to decide how to distinguish the case of the drug sniffing dog near a home from a drug sniffing dog near a car. Great. But that is the wrong question entirely. It turns out that drug sniffing dogs have an incredibly high false positive rate--they alert many more times than drugs are actually found once a search is done. Worse the dogs seem to alert much more often if their handler suspects there should be an alert--independent of whether or not there are actually drugs present. So the dog launders the police officer's suspicion instead of actually adding new information.

Dr Lit asked 18 professional dog handlers and their mutts to complete two sets of four brief searches. Thirteen of those who participated worked in drug detection, three in explosives detection, and two worked in both. The dogs had been trained to use one of two signals to indicate to their handlers that they had detected something. Some would bark, others would sit.

The experimental searches took places in the rooms of a church, and each team of dog and human had five minutes allocated to each of the eight searches. Before the searches, the handlers were informed that some of the search areas might contain up to three target scents, and also that in two cases those scents would be marked by pieces of red paper.

What the handlers were not told was that two of the targets contained decoy scents, in the form of unwrapped, hidden sausages, to encourage the dogs’ interest in a false location. Moreover, none of the search areas contained the scents of either drugs or explosives. Any “detections” made by the teams thus had to be false. Recorders, who were blind to the study, noted where handlers indicated that their dogs had raised alerts.

The findings, which Dr Lit reports in Animal Cognition, reveal that of 144 searches, only 21 were clean (no alerts). All the others raised one alert or more. In total, the teams raised 225 alerts, all of them false. While the sheer number of false alerts struck Dr Lit as fascinating, it was where they took place that was of greatest interest.

When handlers could see a red piece of paper, allegedly marking a location of interest, they were much more likely to say that their dogs signalled an alert. Indeed, in the two rooms where red paper was present and sausages were not, 32 of a possible 36 alerts were raised. In the two where both red paper and sausages were present that figure was 30–not significantly different. In contrast, in search areas where a sausage was hidden but no red piece of paper was there for handlers to see, it was only 17.

The dogs, in other words, were distracted only about half the time by the stimulus aimed at them. The human handlers were not only distracted on almost every occasion by the stimulus aimed at them, but also transmitted that distraction to their animals–who responded accordingly. To mix metaphors, the dogs were crying “wolf” at the unconscious behest of their handlers.

A tracking study was done of drug sniffing dogs in Illinois which found that the searches their 'alerts' triggered found no evidence of drugs 56% of the time. For Hispanic people searched as a result of the 'alerts' there was no evidence of drugs 63% of the time. Chicago Times

This is a problem because drug sniffing dogs are supposed to be used as a tool leading to probable cause for a search. The dog sniffs are used when the police officer does not have probable cause to search someone he is suspicious of. If the dog alerts, he now has probable cause and can search the suspect, the suspect's car, and if the state attorney general offices get their way they can search a home.

But in Illinois, a dog sniff doesn't lead to discovery of evidence of drugs even 50% of the time. Dr. Lit's experiment suggests that the false positive for the sniff alert is extremely high. Essentially the dog can pick up on the suspicions of the handler, and alerts on that basis. But if the suspicions of the police officer aren't enough for a probable cause search, they shouldn't be enough for a probable cause search when laundered through the dog 'alert' either. The dog alert is relevant only if it provides strong additional information. That is the issue which the law should be focusing on. Fine line distinctions between car 'non-searches' and house 'non-searches' are irrelevant if the dog isn't providing a reliable independent factor for probable cause.

The fact is that in Illinois (the only state to track it comprehensively) even if a police officer already suspects you of being involved in the drug trade, and then gets a drug sniffing dog out, and then the dog gives an alert, the police officer only finds drugs or evidence of drugs 46% of the time (27% of the time if you're Hispanic). If a police officer suspected a Hispanic person of being involved in the drug trade, didn't have independent probable cause for a search, but flipped a coin twice and only searched when it came up heads at least once, would we say that the coin flip produced probable cause?

December 26, 2011

This is a post with two motivations. The first is to ask a question that has been baffling me since the start of the Republican debates and primaries: why can't Jon Huntsman get any traction?

The second motivation is to lay out some bait for OC to jump in and give us his thoughts on the (R) primaries and debates in general. Door's open OC!

So: Huntsman. From what I can tell, the guy has a gold-plated resume. Wealthy former CEO of a very successful family run business. Strongly family oriented, socially conservative Mormon from among the reddest of the red states. Wildly popular and effective governor of Utah. Undergraduate degree in international politics from U Penn. Served in government under Reagan, Bush I and Bush II. Twice a US ambassador, and the first time he was the youngest ambassador ever.

The man has done some things.

He is also palpably sane. IMVHO, he is the candidate who would be the most likely to steal votes away from Obama. A lot of folks who are unhappy with Obama, but who are frankly somewhere between turned off and freaked the heck out by the other (R) candidates, would likely find it quite easy to vote for Huntsman.

Is he just too far out their on the kinder / gentler tip? Why can't the guy get any voter love? I don't think he's ever broken double digits.

To be clear, I do not agree with Huntsman on most issues I can think of, and would not be casting my personal vote for him. I'm just completely baffled about why he's not just not more successful, but has basically failed to register *at all*.

kaputtreparieren, verb ("kaputt" + "repair"): repair or tinker with a thing to the point that it becomes broken.

Warning sign for Verschlimmbesserung: the phrase "to serve you better".

I have been dealing all day (and indeed much of the week) with Verschlimmbesserungen for Firefox, Wordpress, and livejournal.com. Today was one damn kaputtrepair after another.

Where good intentions go. Graveyard under Snow, by Caspar David Friedrich -- another good thing from Germany.

Speaking of useful words from German, I'm pretty sure I only learned the word Schadenfreude around 15 years ago -- or at least that's when I started seeing it enough for it to stick. Yup, Google's Ngram viewer confirms:

Mandelstam was last seen in December 1938, rooting through a garbage heap near Vladivostok. He had ventured some remarks critical of the Soviet Government, which drolly illustrated his error by sending him to Siberia to be starved and beaten to death.

The most distinctive aspect of Dutch women's work was the constant cleaning:

The spick-and-span towns shone from hours of tireless sweeping, scrubbing, scraping, burnishing, mapping, rubbing and washing. They made an embarrassing contrast to the porridge of filth and ordure that slopped over the cobbles of most other European cities in the seventeenth century. "The beauty and cleanliness of the streets are so extraordinary," ran an English account, "that Persons of all ranks do not scruple, but even seem to take pleasure in walking them." [p 375]

Streets so clean you'd want to walk there, wow.

The Little Street by Vermeer. A small Delft side-street occupied by people of no particular wealth, but cleaner than any but the grandest locations elsewhere in Europe. I don't know if Japanese side-streets were this clean yet.

December 18, 2011

OK, so the Iraq War is now officially over. They've lowered the flag, the last combat troops crossed the border today at 4:27 UTC. I think the big -- bigger than Vatican City -- embassy is still there and open for business, so I'm sure there are still some Americans there with guns, but warfighting folks are, apparently, on their way home.

I have, basically, no opinion on whether it was 'worth it' or not. I don't even know how you measure stuff like that. To me, you go to war if you have to, if you have no other choice. I personally don't think Iraq met that bar, but I'm not sure there's any point in arguing about it anymore. The dead are dead.

I'm glad it's over. I hope everyone gets home safe. I hope the place doesn't melt down in our absence. I hope we find a way to take care of all of the folks we sent there, and who now will be coming home to a not-particularly-thrilling homefront.

I hope we find a way to get the hell out of Afghanistan sometime soon.

That's pretty much all I have to say on the topic. But it's a pretty big milestone, so I thought I'd put a post up for folks to offer their own thoughts.

December 17, 2011

Sorry about the lack of posting, gang. In addition to doing a lot of that "work" thing, I've been shopping for a used car. I don't know if anyone predicted, back in 1996 or so, how much that old-school business would change in the next ten years. Now, although buying a used car is still a pain in the butt, it's not a *nightmarish* one.

Cadillac Ranch. I hadn't realized that the cars are normally covered with colorful graffiti, as a kind of ongoing public art project.